POLITE REMNANTS (Laissez Unfaire/Lascia Fare), 2011-2014, photography, 77 x 115 cm (30 x 45 in), archival ink on Epson matte paper. Formed by gathering the remnants of human textiles & machine labor, the formally studio-lit portraits of machined-washed residual become friendly posed objects. The remains were formed of lint caught in drying machine sieves, found in homes and laundromats in various parts of the world. The first impulse to make the series was an interest in dust, magnetics, and accumulation. I wondered, could understanding a system come about through studying a byproduct of that system? Invisible, often actually means marginalized, discarded, internalized without recognition of that process and/or ignored: when there is almost always a material or observable fact, tied to an ideological assumption or logic to be examined. By looking at these discarded objects as an archive, Polite Remnants asks viewers to consider systemic changes in the way matters are handled. In laisséz-faire systems, government remains out of business dealings. However in a Laisséz-unfaire system, there are systems created for gathering remnants, and entire systems created to manufacture remains, not so different from planned obsolescence. In Italian, Lascia Fare takes on a specially different meaning and action: Let It Be which often means to let something go, or do nothing about that. In the dialectic and semiotic investigations, Polite Remnants (Laisséz-Unfaire/Lascia Fare), makes visible nascent knowledge embedded in the everyday life of machine and human labor and asks where the responsibility is formed, managed, or accumulated, and to what end result. Perhaps by looking at portraits of byproducts, the machinations around the ideas of progress are revealed as a means to evaluate their qualities and results. These are but a sample of the images, there are 46 lint portraits in this work. Lint happens to be a highly flammable material, used often to build campfires.
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